Wikitheoria: A Computational Framework for Parsimonious Sociology Theory Construction

In the social sciences, theory construction refers to the research process of building testable scientific theories to explain and predict observed phenomena in the natural world. Terms represent the theories' concepts or ideas and their meanings are explicated in their definitions. The principle of parsimony, an important criterion for evaluating the quality of theories (e.g., as exemplified by Occam's Razor) mandates that we minimize the number of definitions (terms) used in a given theory. Conventional methods for parsimony analysis in theory construction are based on the heuristic approaches. However, it is not always easy for young researchers to understand the theoretical work in a given area because of the problem of "tacit knowledge", which often makes results lack coherence and logical integrity. Therefore, we propose a generic knowledge aggregation framework to facilitate the parsimonious approach of theory construction with a cloud-based theory modularization platform and semantic-based algorithms to minimize the number of definitions. The proposed approach is demonstrated and evaluated using the modularized theories from the database and sociological definitions retrieved from the system lexicon and sociological literature. The experiment results showed that the proposed approach achieves the precision of 82%, recall of 82% and accuracy of 81.69%. This study proves the effectiveness of using cloud-based knowledge aggregation system and semantic analysis models for promoting the parsimonious sociology theory construction.